Peer supervision is an integral part of our practice. We have had between 6 to 8 hourly supervision sessions a year for the past few years and value the expertise in each of our coaching markets to provide the necessary space to check our fitness to practice. Our ultimate agenda when we participate in our sessions is to check our fitness to practice. Under the umbrella of peer supervision, we can move between the following four areas depending on what the other brings to supervision:

• Supervision for coaching – Stress testing the rigour of our coaching practice in our business and its consequences.

• Coaching supervision – Deepening and strengthening our psychological awareness, capabilities and capacities as a coach.

• Supervisory coaching – Understanding what we are doing in our coaching practice.

• Coaching – Dealing with any immediate challenges affecting how we work with our stakeholders.

Importantly, as part of our individual practice, we have been working on our unique coaching framework for a similar length, starting with our APECS accreditation process for our Accredited Master Executive Coach award. After completing the Accreditation, we were both invested in digging deeper and developing our unique coaching framework. This is how we started our peer engagement which was underpinned by our recognition that an individual has their own philosophy, impact and openness to enabling potential. Respecting each other's starting point, we intentionally used our peer coaching sessions to support our self/professional reflections on what we are doing in our practice and produce various materials about our work, including blogs, company manuals, published books, etc. We also appreciated that we each have our network of mentors and supervisors, of which we are one member of their board of directors.

Peer supervision process

Every supervision group will have their own ritual for engaging in their process. After progressive refinements of the structure we use to make our peer supervision work for us, we're sharing what works for us.

Pre-supervision invitation – Day before the meeting

• Initiate and agree when supervision is happening

• Share keywords/top-line of what it is that each is going to bring to the meeting

Supervision – mutually agreed time and date

• Meet for peer-supervision (for us, this is via zoom)

• Check in personally with each other at the start of the session

• We usually take turns to bring a coaching case study or challenge to the session; however, if something is urgent for the other, we will begin with their needs first.

  • Depending on the desired outcome contracted for, we'll hold the space and are their visible supervisory partners in one or more of the four areas: supervision for coaching, coaching supervision, supervisory coaching and coaching.

  • We openly bring our expertise, perspectives, shared knowledge, professional experiences, and personal developments to our peer supervision to enable their continuous professional and personal development and regularly check out their professionalism and code of conduct.

  • Reflect on the outcomes and see if there are any actions pending

• And finally, we share our reflections, individually and collectively, on the session itself.

Examples of supervisory case studies/challenges

• Workplace engagement and discrimination

• Stakeholder engagement and management

• Unhealthy transference of the client's words and emotions

• Unique patterns of practice

• Doing what we think the clients want vs what they actually want

• Clarification between giving advice vs offering perspectives

• Code of conduct for large-scale organizational coaching

• Clarifying coaching impact

• Commercial propositions

• Perceptions of clients and their challenges

• Quality of coaching engagement

• The fit of coaching engagement between the coach and the client

• Turning down coaching opportunities

One supervisor doesn't fit all

Through our peer conversations, we each continue with our individual development of balancing our coaching practice and business. We're looking for that sweet spot between the two to ensure that we grow and develop as a coach with a viable business. Therefore, finding your supervisors to help you with different aspects of your business, practice, and self-development is essential. Like the joke, whilst cruel, are you seeking a supervisor who has five years of experience (either like a deep generalist/specialist) or a supervisor who has one year of experience repeated five times? As a coach, you need to find those supervisors who will stress-test your balance point between being and doing coaching.

Starting with… what questions do you need to explore as part of your practice and business of coaching during supervision, for example :

• Why do you coach? Justify your actions by answering the bigger picture question of why you want to make an impact through coaching (aspiration/vision/mission).

• How do you coach? Describe your 'intuitive' process and coaching approach that leads to action and its resulting consequence (coaching impact).

• Who are you as a coach? Know who you want to be personally (identity) and what you what to be as a coach (professionally) that's most important to you (values). 

• What is a coach to you? Close your feedback learning loop of either drawing from experience and then connecting to information (educational learning) or starting from information and then connecting to the experience of what a coach is expected to be (ethics).

• Which coaching styles and contracts produce the best results for you and your client?

• Ideally aligned with your personal and coaching philosophy, what coaching niche brings you more commercial opportunities to grow your business?

• Where do you find you have the most impact, intentionally and unintentionally?

• What impacts you when you coach, intentionally and unintentionally?

• Where does your confidence arise as a coach, and how do you best optimize your skills, strengths and capabilities during coaching?

• How are your coaching practice and business evolving in the current market conditions?

• Identify new areas for learning and growth in subject areas relevant to your work as a coach.

Next, what structure, style and format are you looking for from supervision? E.g.

• Do you know what outcomes you are looking for from supervision?

• Do you know what type of supervisory approach you want?

• Do you prefer to engage with a peer supervisor (typically unpaid), a supervisor (paid), or both?

• Do you prefer short and intensive supervisory engagements (months) or an ongoing engagement that lasts over a longer duration (years)?

• Do you know which challenges you are most comfortable bringing to your supervisor from your coaching practice, business, or both?

• Do you prefer setting a clear agenda at the start of every session, or are you more comfortable following the agenda set by your supervisor?

• Do you prefer working on project-based cases, or do you prefer working on role developments?

• Do you want all your supervisory sessions to be of high impact or a combination of high impact and good enough conversations?

• Do you prefer only to have supervision provided by your company, choose independent supervision, or both?

Importantly, through supervision, when it comes all together, the results will,

• Help you, the coach, evaluate whether you are continually fit to practice.

• Support you to continue mapping your coaching framework for your business.

• Continue deepening your coaching philosophy for your practice.

• Regularly scrutinize and self-reflect on what's working well, or not, in the way you coach and do business.

Much of what we have shared is for coaches who are fairly settled in their own coaching business and have a clearer idea of the type of supervision they are looking for. For those coaches who are just starting out and may have less than three years of commercial experience, we wanted to offer you five questions to enable you to explore and clarify for yourself what you want to achieve through coaching to help you find a suitable supervisor for you,

1. Why is coaching vital to you? E.g. Why do you want to help people?

2. What impact do you want to have on the people that you coach? Be specific as possible.

3. Where do you find you have the most impact, intentionally and unintentionally?

4. Where do you want to have the most impact continually?

5. How focused or open does your coaching practice need to be to have the most significant impact?

Read other blog-articles by Yvonne Thackray via tgc The Bloggers

Yvonne Thackray is an executive coach and peer supervisor, and a practitioner researcher and editor, who has combined her passions through all these roles for the past decade at the good coach. She works with clients internationally, with a keen interest in leadership (professional and personal) and knowledge management (intuition and tacit knowledge). A specialist in the field of coaching she defines coaching as providing that quality of attention that enables another person to have the confidence and clarity to reach and humbly manage their potentials now and in the future.

Connect with Katy Tuncer via LinkedIn

I invent products and coaching methods that transform leadership mindsets. The leaders and coaches I coach are proving the value of our work together every day, by achieving world-changing business results. Katy Tuncer is Director of Coaching, Horizon37 Ltd. Horizon37 designs and delivers leadership coaching programmes for scale-up exec and non-exec teams, enabling them to succeed in breaking new ground.

A serial founder, Katy has “been there, done that” in a vast array of senior leadership roles (in tech start-ups, McKinsey, the British Army, Met Police). Katy brings perspective and insight to transform how leaders think, and she coaches at pace. It’s all about results. Katy is also a McKinsey trained consultant and accredited executive coach (APECS), with a strong and diverse track record of personal leadership and is a global expert on women’s physical activity. She was also listed as one of the BBC 100 Women and also won a Prime Minister's 2016 Point of Light award for her community volunteering.